Ascension: Hyperlinked Gateway
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Most transport hubs ask people to move on quickly. Ascension asks whether a place of transfer can also give a new city a sense of arrival. At the threshold of Quzhou Smart City’s high-speed rail district and the City Garden Corridor, the project turns rail lines into rooflines, movement into orientation, and infrastructure into a civic gateway.
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Golden Trezzini Awards 2025, Gold,
Best Project of Residential or Mixed-Use

Featured in CTBUH Vertical Urbanism, Issue III / Q1 2025, edited by Will Hunter, Executive Editor of CTBUH.
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Client: Quzhou Municipality
Location: Quzhou Smart New City, China
Area: 127,000 m²
Typology: Mixed-Use Landmark / Civic Gateway / Transit-Oriented Development / Vertical Urbanism / Public Realm

A Place to Arrive
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Stations are usually places of urgency. People check the board, look for the exit, meet someone quickly, or move toward the next connection. For a new district, this can become a problem. A place may work efficiently and still leave almost no memory behind.

Ascension: Hyperlinked Gateway begins from this ordinary experience of transit. Proposed for Quzhou Smart City, at a site envisioned as a major national transfer hub, the project asks how infrastructure can help a new urban district become recognizable.

The answer is not simply to make a taller object. It is to give movement a form people can remember. Railway lines, pedestrian flows, landscape corridors, public space, and vertical program are gathered into a gateway that marks arrival while opening the city toward the lake, the station, and the wider region.

Ascension becomes a place where the city can say: this is where you arrive.

Rail Lines, Rooflines, and the Image of Home
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The project takes its first gesture from the high-speed rail lines of Quzhouxi Station. Lines that normally remain flat, technical, and anonymous are lifted into the air, becoming reflective, glowing, extruded forms.

As these lines rise, they begin to change character. The track geometry bends toward the familiar outline of a sloped roof: one of the simplest images of shelter. Seen from different angles, the towers shift between railway line, gateway, and house-like silhouette.

This is where Ascension becomes more than a transport symbol. It connects the speed of rail infrastructure with the slower memory of dwelling. The gateway does not only announce movement; it gives the new district an image of arrival, shelter, and belonging.

Two main towers rise toward one another, forming a threshold between the station district and the landscape beyond. Smaller companion volumes extend the movement across the site, so the project reads less as a single monument and more as a sequence of urban markers.

Together, the towers create a moment of recognition: the point where the boulevard, the station, the City Garden Corridor, and Wenli Lake begin to feel part of the same place.

A Hyperlink You Can Walk Through
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The word “hyperlink” is not used here as a digital metaphor only. It describes how the project works spatially.

Ascension works through a series of crossings: from station to city, from boulevard to lake, from public ground to tower, from the urgency of transit to the slower act of staying. It connects different ways of moving and using the city: commuting, walking, waiting, gathering, working, looking, and crossing.

The towers turn and open toward surrounding urban directions. They behave less like isolated icons and more like connective markers, catching movement from different sides and giving it a shared center.

In that sense, the gateway is not just something to look at. It is something the city moves through.

The Hearth of the City
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The project becomes most convincing at the ground, where the scale of infrastructure gives way to the scale of waiting, meeting, and looking around.

Between the towers, the station district gains a civic room. It is a place to wait without feeling lost, to meet before a journey, to look toward the lake, or simply to understand where you are in a new part of the city.

This public ground gives the project its human scale beneath the larger skyline gesture. People may arrive because of the railway, but the project gives them a reason to pause.

Ascension therefore works at two speeds. From a distance, it becomes a marker for Quzhou Smart City. Up close, it becomes a shared ground for everyday life.

Flowing Toward Wenli Lake
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Ascension sits at the terminus of the City Garden Corridor, where the green network of the new city moves toward Wenli Lake. The project keeps this continuity open, allowing landscape, view, and pedestrian movement to pass through the site rather than stop at its edge.

The green corridor also rises into the architecture. Planted and layered façades soften the towers, extending the idea of landscape upward and making the high-rise forms part of a larger civic ecology.

This creates a threshold between two kinds of movement: the fast movement of rail infrastructure and the slower movement of walking toward water. The project holds both conditions together.

A Landmark That Changes With the City
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Ascension is designed as a landmark, but not as a fixed image. Its towers bend, rise, reflect, and shift as people move around them. From one direction, they read as rail lines lifted into the sky. From another, they form a gateway. From the public ground, they frame the sky and the movement of the city below.

The building holds two readings at once: the speed and precision of rail infrastructure, and the softer image of landscape, roofline, and shelter.

The towers are not conceived as closed objects. Their surfaces reflect the city, carry planting upward, and change with light and movement, so the gateway is read differently from the station, the boulevard, the lake, and the public ground below.

Vertical Life Beyond the Icon
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Ascension is not only about the skyline. Its mixed-use program is organized around the idea that vertical development can still belong to public life.

The lower levels are designed for flexible uses that can host social, cultural, technological, commercial, and sportive activity. The upper volumes rise above this active base, creating a layered relationship between public ground, vertical program, and urban image.

The project avoids the usual split between tower and city. It treats verticality as part of the public experience, not as a retreat from it.

Infrastructure as Identity
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Ascension asks a simple urban question: how can a new town shaped by transit avoid becoming anonymous?

Its answer is to transform movement into memory. Railway lines become towers. Track geometry becomes roofline. A transfer hub becomes a civic room. A green corridor becomes a vertical landscape. A station district becomes a place of recognition.

Cities do not grow through expansion alone. They also need thresholds, shared images, and public places where people understand where they are. Ascension gives Quzhou Smart City such a point: a gateway that links the city to wider networks while giving it a center of its own.

Environmental and Social Impact
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Ascension supports a more civic model of transit-oriented development. The project treats a transfer district as a place rather than a passage, organizing public space, mixed-use program, landscape continuity, and vertical development around arrival, waiting, gathering, and orientation.

Its environmental strategy is carried by a façade system that combines planting, reflection, and renewable energy. Planted façades extend the City Garden Corridor upward, creating shaded vertical surfaces that help soften heat gain, improve the microclimatic edge of the towers, and mediate between urban density and the natural setting.

On selected reflective surfaces, thin-film photovoltaic glass panels allow the towers to harvest solar energy while maintaining a light, mirror-like urban presence. The reflective quality of the façade also helps redirect excess solar radiation away from the building, reducing absorbed heat at the envelope. Together, the planted and reflective surfaces create a more active climatic skin: shading, reflecting, producing energy, and giving the towers a changing relationship with light, landscape, and movement.

Ascension contributes to SDG 9 by transforming transport infrastructure into civic, cultural, and environmental architecture. It supports SDG 11 by creating a recognizable public center for an emerging district, organized around pedestrian continuity, mixed use, and shared urban space. Its planted and reflective façade strategies contribute to SDG 13 by reducing environmental load and strengthening the relationship between high-rise development and landscape. Through its thin-film photovoltaic façade surfaces, the project also supports SDG 7 by integrating renewable energy generation into the architectural envelope.

The project proposes a model for the urban gateway where transit, landscape, environmental performance, public life, and identity are held together in one civic experience.

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Ascension Hyperlinked Gateway, Quzhou Smart City, Quzhou Architecture, China Architecture, High-Speed Railway New Town, Quzhouxi Station, Transit-Oriented Development, Civic Gateway, Urban Landmark, Mixed-Use Tower, Vertical Urbanism, CTBUH Vertical Urbanism, City Garden Corridor, Wenli Lake, Railway Station Architecture, Gateway Towers, Public Realm, Civic Square, Green Corridor, Vegetated Façade, Reflective Façade, Sloped Roof, Roofline, Traditional Housing, Infrastructure Architecture, Landscape Urbanism, Mixed-Use Development, Sustainable Urban Design, Smart City, Urban Identity, SDG 9, SDG 11, SDG 13